DOJ says Alabama prisons likely in violation of Constitution

The U.S. Department of Justice announced today there is reasonable cause to believe conditions in Alabama prisons violate the Constitution in a report that includes jolting accounts of violence and death inside the crowded and dangerously understaffed facilities.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Alabama released the results of a statewide investigation launched two and a half years ago.

The DOJ concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that conditions in men’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment because of a failure to protect prisoners from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and a failure to provide prisoners with safe conditions. The report said Alabama prisons have the highest homicide rate in the nation and that violence has increased dramatically in the last five and a half years.

“The violations are severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision; overcrowding; ineffective housing and classification protocols; inadequate incident reporting; inability to control the flow of contraband into and within the prisons, including illegal drugs and weapons; ineffective prison management and training; insufficient maintenance and cleaning of facilities; the use of segregation and solitary confinement to both punish and protect victims of violence and/or sexual abuse; and a high level of violence that is too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive,” the report says.

Alabama prisons have about one-third the number of authorized correctional officers and several prisons have fewer than 20 percent of authorized staff, the report said.

Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, who has led criminal justice reform efforts in the Legislature, said the state has 49 days to provide a response to the findings. Ward said he expects the Legislature’s prison oversight committee to be the forum to work on the issues and expects meetings to begin as early as next week. Ward said DOJ officials met with him and other state officials on Tuesday and showed them the report. He said it was not surprising but added new urgency to the need to improve state prisons.

“The governor, the attorney general, the leadership in the House and the Senate, we were all in one room when were presented with this,” Ward said. “So, we’re all on the same page in trying to get it fixed.”

The report says the U.S. attorney general may initiate a lawsuit in 49 days to correct deficiencies if state officials have not adequately addressed them.

The investigation was conducted under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, CRIPA. The DOJ said CRIPA investigations of other correctional systems have led to reforms through settlement agreements with those systems.

The DOJ said it has given the state written notice of the facts supporting the allegations the minimum steps needed to address them.

“The Constitution guarantees all prisoners the right to be housed in safe conditions and not be subjected to violence and sexual abuse,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division said in the press release. “Our investigation found reasonable cause to believe that Alabama fails to provide constitutionally adequate conditions and that prisoners experience serious harm, including deadly harm, as a result. The Justice Department hopes to work with Alabama to resolve the Department’s concerns.”

U.S. Attorney Richard Moore of the Southern District of Alabama said in a statement the findings indicate a “flagrant disregard” for the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

“The failure to respect the rule of law by providing humane treatment for inmates in Alabama prisons is a poor reflection on those of us who live and work in Alabama," Moore said. "We are better than this. We do not need to tarry very long assessing blame, but rather commit to righting this wrong and spare our State further embarrassment."

Northern District U.S. Attorney Jay Town said: “This massive undertaking alleges constitutional troubles in the Alabama Department of Corrections which are serious, systemic, and in need of fundamental and comprehensive change. That being said, I have great confidence in the State of Alabama’s resolve to correct the prison system’s problems. The commitment by Governor Ivey, Commissioner Dunn, and so many others in the State’s leadership to affirmatively address these inherited issues offers great promise of our development of a meaningful remedy.”

Middle District U.S. Attorney Louis V. Franklin Sr., said: “An extraordinary amount of time and effort was expended to investigate this matter. Although the results of this investigation are disturbing, I look at this as an opportunity to acknowledge that the problems are real and need to be addressed immediately. We are committed to working with State officials to ensure that the Department of Corrections abides by its constitutional obligations.”

As evidence of the dangers inside Alabama prisons, the report recounts incidents during a single week in September 2017.

In a dorm at Bibb Correctional Facility known as the “Hot Bay,” with limited supervision and no programming, two inmates stood guard watching for correctional staff while other inmates stabbed a prisoner who bled to death.

At St. Clair Correctional Facility, a prisoner in the honor dorm was beaten by two other inmates with a sock filled with metal locks. At Staton prison, an inmate threatened an officer with a seven-inch knife. At Fountain, an inmate set another’s blanket on fire while he was sleeping. At Easterling, a prisoner was forced at knife point to perform oral sex on two others. And a prisoner at Bullock died from an overdose of a synthetic cannabinoid.

Those were just some of the incidents found in ADOC records from that single week that were described in the report.

For years, Alabama prisons have housed far more inmates than they were built for and employed too few correctional officers. Alabama Department of Corrections officials said the crowding and understaffing contribute to rising violence in prisons.

A spike in inmate suicides is one of the issues that has surfaced in a federal lawsuit over health care for inmates. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in 2017 that mental health care for inmates was “horrendously inadequate.” The ADOC is under court orders to increase mental health staff and security staff.

Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statement this morning in response to the DOJ’s findings.

“We appreciate the U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to ensure open lines of communication with the State of Alabama. DOJ has identified many of the same areas of concern that we have discussed publicly for some time,” Ivey said. “Over the coming months, my Administration will be working closely with DOJ to ensure that our mutual concerns are addressed and that we remain steadfast in our commitment to public safety, making certain that this Alabama problem has an Alabama solution.”

The governor’s office said the Alabama Department of Corrections already acknowledged many of the issues in the DOJ’s findings letter and has been working to address them.

The Legislature has increased funding for prisons, partly in response to Thompson’s ruling. Ivey has asked the Legislature for a $40 million increase next year, with much of that money intended to help recruit 500 correctional officers. The court has ordered the ADOC to add about 2,000 correctional officers over the next few years, a number taken from an ADOC analysis of staffing needs.

Today’s DOJ report says the warden at Holman Correctional Facility told investigators she had “probably 11” security staff per shift at the prison, which has about 800 inmates.

“No human being should be made to live in conditions that are both inhumane and outright unconstitutional,” Sewell said in a statement. "I urge Gov. Ivey and the state legislature to work with federal authorities to make substantial changes to address the report’s findings and foster an environment of rehabilitation, rather than one that perpetuates a cycle of trauma and violence.”

Over about the last five years, sentencing guidelines and criminal justice reforms enacted by the Legislature have reduced the prison population but it is still about 160 percent of the number prisons were built to hold.

The DOJ report says that occupancy in the state’s 13 major prisons is about 182 percent of capacity excluding work release and other facilities. In November 2018, Kilby Correctional Facility had 1,407 inmates in a facility designed for 440, and occupancy rate of 320 percent.

In February, Ivey announced her administration planned to seek proposals from companies to build three men’s prisons and close most of the existing facilities. ADOC officials say it would cost too much to fix the state’s aging prisons and that consolidating most of the prison operations in modern facilities will be cost effective, make prisons safer and allow for better rehabilitation, education and health care for inmates. An initial estimate placed the cost of new prisons at about $900 million.

In 2014, the Justice Department found conditions at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women were unconstitutional because of a failure to protect inmates from sexual abuse and harassment by male staff.

The Justice Department and the ADOC reached a settlement in 2015 intended to address the problems at Tutwiler. ADOC officials said conditions at the prison have improved.

Today’s notification, which is about men’s prisons, concerned two of three areas covered by the investigation, whether prisoners were protected from violence and sexual abuse by other inmates and whether conditions were safe. A third remains pending, the DOJ said -- whether prisoners are adequately protected from excessive use of force by prison staff and sexual abuse by prison staff.

The report says the investigation included site visits to four prisons -- Donaldson, Bibb, Draper and Holman -- and interviews with prisoners at several others. It says investigators interviewed hundreds of prisoners and about 55 ADOC staffers.

Investigators received hundreds of emails from prisoners and family members to an email account set up for the investigation.

The report says the ADOC publicly reported 24 inmate homicides between January 2015 and June 2018. It says investigators identified three additional homicides that were not reported as homicides.

“These unreported homicides provide reasonable cause to believe that ADOC’s homicide rate is higher than what ADOC has publicly reported," the report says. “There are numerous instances where ADOC incident reports classified deaths as due to ‘natural’ causes when, in actuality, the deaths were likely caused by prisoner-on-prisoner violence. This is especially concerning given that these incident reports are used for public statistical reporting as required by law.”

The report cites incidents that investigators said indicate prison officials cannot protect inmates even when they have warning. It says an inmate at Bullock was killed by blunt force head trauma in February 2018 one day after warning the prison’s shift commander that he had been threatened over the loss of a cell phone. The same month, an inmate at St. Clair was killed in a knife fight with another inmate who had three previous prison incidents involving knives.

In March 2018, an inmate at Donaldson was hospitalized and had emergency surgery after a broomstick was inserted into his rectum, the report says.

“This incident is just one of hundreds of similar incidents that are documented by ADOC throughout Alabama’s prisons," the report says. "Prisoner-on-prisoner violence is systemic and life-threatening. ADOC is failing to adequately protect its prisoners from harm, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”

The report says extortion of prisoners and family members is common. The mother of a prisoner at Ventress reported that her son was beaten and threatened with rape for failure to pay an alleged $600 debt to another prisoner. The mother later reported that a prisoner at Ventress texted her photos of a prisoner’s genitals from a cell phone and threatened to chop her son into pieces and rape him if she did not send him $800.

Dangerous and illegal drugs are prevalent in Alabama prisons, the report says. ADOC employees are not screened for contraband, the report says.

One is to add 500 correctional officers within six months. Another is to commission a study within six months to determine the feasibility of transferring prisoners to non-ADOC facilities in sufficient numbers that remaining prisoners will be adequately supervised.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Lane Woodke, Jason Cheek, and Carla Ward from the Northern District of Alabama Civil Division helped to lead the statewide investigation.